


watching my world turn from white to maroon (Kristen Applebees Character Study)

by hollyjollyturnabout



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series), Fantasy High
Genre: All characters but Kristen are just mentioned!, Character Study, Gen, I am an environmental biology major who took anatomy 4 years ago so if i dunk this, TW: Blood, and my writing knows no rest, but if you it didnt work for you i totally understand, i am deeply sorry, i had to get this up before the finale tonight because god has cursed me for my hubris, if you'd like me to tag anything else please let me know!, please excuse my disjointed thoughts on this, takes place during finale part 1, this was very cathartic to me, tw: anatomy, tw: broken bones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:33:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23450071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollyjollyturnabout/pseuds/hollyjollyturnabout
Summary: The anatomy of a cleric neither alive nor dead. Kristen Applebees as she wakes up on the floor of the Temple to the Nameless Goddess. (MAJOR spoilers for the finale of Fantasy High Live - Sophomore Year! Do not read on if you are not caught up! Notes at the end!)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 22





	watching my world turn from white to maroon (Kristen Applebees Character Study)

Kristen’s thoughts are scrambled as she rises from the dead, but she knows that it’s the kind of wildness that happens before a breakdown. Jawbone taught her that much, in lessons on psychology taught after classes, when he’s instructing Tracker on controlling herself on waxing-moon nights, when Adaine’s portent rolls are shit and she’s just trying to make it through the day, when Ragh comes in after a particularly bloody Bloodrush game. He taught breathing exercises right next to her, taught her the ins and outs of panic attacks; he kept his clawed hand on hers when she talked to him about her brothers in between halting, stuttering breaths. She learned what happened to her mind right before a panic, and she’s remembering it all now, so she has to regain control over her situation. She has to regain control or this forest is going to take her, and she’ll turn into a Kristen-sized ball of pure doubt, unable to piece together even her own existence, much less words, or purpose, or a name. So she picks herself up from the floor, minding the gooey remains of herself beneath her, and starts an assessment.

The floor is stone, just as she left it. The walls are the same walls she remembers when she came in. However long ago that was, she doesn’t dwell on. It’s too open-ended - open like the chamber room, open-ended in the way that it won’t end in the next minute. _We stick to minute-answer questions, Kristen, when we get like this,_ a gruff voice reminds her. _If you can’t answer it in a minute, you’ll spiral again. What’s your name? What did you eat for breakfast this morning? What color are your eyes? What color is the sun?_ So she won’t dwell on how long she’s been here, as cloying of a question that is. 

There is a hallway that goes back the way she came. It is modified by chunks of rock removed from the doorway to the room, as if by a blunt object. Deep ruddy-red rocks lay scattered across the floor, a shattered blemish on an otherwise beautiful temple to the nameless goddess she may or may not have spoken to. Oh, that’s definitely not a minute question. Who was that voice? Why did she kill her? What praise _would_ Kristen have in death? Unclear. Move on. Do not dwell. Do not dwell.

Is she dwelling past her expiration date?

_Now is the time for self-assessment. Look at your body. You’re still here, and your friends are with you, and you’re going to be okay. Take some deep breaths._

She only remembers to breathe when her hand touches the bloody hole that a horn left in her, and it comes out in a sharp gasp, sharper because she has to force air into her lungs. She has to force lungs that have ceased working to attempt to work again, to pull oxygen into themselves when they previously didn’t do anything. She doesn’t know if the oxygen does anything, now, or how she’s moving. How can she move without air in her lungs? How is she metabolizing anything? She took a medicine class this year, and nothing about this makes sense. This year? Is it this year? How has time passed? She looks at her hands again, and realizes that part of her pinky is gone, ripped off, and she’s spilling more blood on the floor, lazily, like her heart isn’t beating it anymore.

Her heart. _Look at your body. You’re going to be okay._

Her body is not falling apart, by the grace of Can’t Answer That Right Now, but it is covered in blood. And the source of that blood has not been addressed yet.

Kristen Applebees calmly takes her hand and maneuvers it to cast the Light cantrip. She’s done this before at summer camp, to pull out a splinter from a crying kid, or to check her brother’s tonsils to make sure they aren’t covered in white spots after a particularly nasty case of strep broke out in his school. It is a simple thing, to be a light, and she needs simplicity right now. She opens her crystal to use that as a light over herself as well, and realizes that very little time has passed. Ten minutes since she entered the room. That’s a question answered quickly. She feels her breaths evening out (not stopping, though, because she won’t let herself stop breathing, even if it does nothing, even if it means nothing). She bites down on her lip and gently places a hand on the hole on her chest. 

It’s an odd sensation, feeling a patch of skin that is freshly wounded. It hurts in pinpricks, not in an absolute, all-encompassing ache or stab. The skin around the stab wound is raw and rare, stained with red that is rapidly turning brown under her fingers, like the rocks along the wall. She wonders, for half a second, if she’s turning to stone, but recalls how that feels (Ficus isn’t allowed at _any_ more Zelda parties), and discounts the thought. It’s almost better than being burned alive, because the burning was so all-encompassing she nearly whited out from the pain, and then felt nothing at all. All, then nothing. A little moderation was better than the two extremes of feeling, and she feels like she can endure a little more. And so, after resting her hand over her heart, she maneuvers her lit hand to be able to see better, and pushes her hand through her chest.

She feels the splintered remains of bone stuck into her skin, where the horn pushed shattered ribs out in front of her. She sees that, now, things that she first discarded as blood-soaked white rocks. Those are her. Those broken ribs. _Move deeper._ She goes beneath the hole in her ribs, careful not to scratch herself on the jagged edges of her sternum, or the bone that sticks out like shards of broken glass. She doesn’t know if she’ll bleed, since she hasn’t felt a pulse course through her since she awoke, but she’s not immune to poison, and none of this shit is sterilized. Her own hand probably isn’t the best tool for an autopsy, but it’s what she’s got, and she’s working with it.

Her hand reaches a mass of tissue that she almost moves to the side, thinking it’s a mangled muscle that moved into her thoracic cavity when she was stabbed. But she pauses and feels it for a moment, in all its mangledness. It’s got tubes extending from it. It’s ruby red, almost pink in the Light, and about the size of her fist. It’s got small holes in it, along with a large puncture through the top left, and as she moves it back and forth, she can hear something sloshing inside of it. It feels room-temperature and elastic, like it could fill up and release. Fill up and release... with blood. This is the remains of a heart.

It has no chambers anymore, she’s sure of that, but it’s still got fluid inside. She dips a finger into her own heart and pulls it back out quickly, waving it in front of her face. It’s covered in blood, just like her. It’s rich and red and, as she wipes it on her tongue, it’s iron-y. She reaches inside just to feel it again, the novelty of the experience weighing on her in that unbelievable way that her brain works sometimes. _I’m feeling my own heart. I’m touching and squeezing and holding my own heart. I’m so in touch with my emotions right now, dude._

It’s leaking out the side, and it’s barely even recognizable as an organ anymore, and she can’t help it; she casts Cure Wounds on herself, hoping that she’ll mend the muscle back into order. Instead, a pale patch of dead skin folds itself over her chest and her back. She reaches behind her to trace it on her back; it’s flimsy and a little scaly, but it should hold if she doesn’t pick at it, like every scab she wore her way through in Sunday mass. She looks at the skin on her chest; it feels the same, and it’s so pale that it’s almost a jaundiced yellow, but it’ll do. It keeps the blood from leaking out. What a concern to have, to have to worry about keeping the blood inside of you, as if Kristen was an overfilled tea kettle boiling over, just on the edge of pouring herself out. She stands up at last, trying to test if she could walk, and hears the blood inside her sloshing around in her dead heart, unable to be pumped out anymore. She doesn’t even know if the heart was healed over, or just the skin. 

She wonders, with a start and another forced gasp, if her body even recognizes her heart as something to heal anymore, or if her innate divine power has deemed it as a disposable hunk of muscle, ready to be broken down and revived as another, more useful part of the body. She wonders if she can make useful parts of herself anymore. She wonders if she is dead. A cursory spell reveals that she’s not, but she wonders if she is alive. She wonders what she is.

But wonderings won’t save her friends, and she needs to move forward. She picks her things off the ground, sutures up her pinkie finger, and starts following footsteps, carrying her broken-bottle-bones inside her. She places two fingers to her neck as she leans over a starlit pool. No pulse.

  
 _Then no need to take deep breaths,_ she thinks, and apologizes to Jawbone for not following his advice before diving into the night.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in a rush as Kristen Applebees stood over my shoulder demanding I intricately explain the process of performing surgery on your own heart. I legitimately may edit this a thousand times before I'm happy with it, but I had to get this baby out in a rush because of how unbelievable Ally and Brennan did with this moment in the episode. I've rewatched it so many times. Christ almighty, please go watch Fantasy High. I'm losing my mind over this show.
> 
> Anyway, hope you liked it! Next fic I post will probably be trackerbees cuz they're important to me!
> 
> Title courtesy of 'Animal Fear' by Marika Hackman, the sapphic werewolf we all deserve in our lives.


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